... is not war. It's propaganda.
The reason why Western (and allied) countries do so well is because they control the majority of the media, and the media is what decides how we view war. As long as "the moral West" remains so, Madeleine Albright can say that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were "worth it" to get rid of Saddam Hussein (to say nothing of the destruction to Iraq itself), while the deaths of a few Americans in Iraq (when they weren't even supposed to be there in the first place is justification for the United States to break international law by assassinating a foreign official, and not just any official, but arguably the one that kept Syria and Iraq from being completely taken over by the Islamic State. But I digress.
Let us consider the case of Omar Khadr. At the age of 15, he was held in Guantanamo Bay for ten years for maybe throwing a grenade that killed an American while in Afghanistan with his father, an al-Qaeda sympathizer. Contrast that to when news surfaced about Australian, UK, and US troops unlawfully executing Afghan civilians and nothing being said for over a decade (as one example). After this, there are "investigations" that reportedly take a very long time and everything is swept under the rug just like Abu Ghraib. Hollywood makes the movie American Sniper that deifies a soldier that killed a bunch of Iraqis, etc., etc. I could go on. There are an inordinate number of examples of "us" not playing by the rules with no consequences and "them" playing by the rules with severe consequences.
Whenever we are at war, we are bombarded with propaganda that justifies why the war is just and why our side is moral. We are also bombarded with propaganda that justifies why our hand is forced because their side is immoral. In the end, it's lambs to the slaughter, since not only are the opponents that we declare war on outmanned, outgunned, and poor, the war also does not occur on our territory threatening our civilians, our environment, and the places where we live. We are not the ones that have to pay to rebuild all of the bombed out buildings and keep people in refugee camps after fleeing war. These are all costs that are foisted onto the countries that are victims of our wars. Iraq pays $52 billion for Kuwait. Halliburton and Blackwater extract massive amounts of money for "services rendered" in Iraq, and in the end Iraq is left with a trail of destruction that requires massive amounts of resources to try to rebuild. And they don't have those resources. We have them.
But whoever said life was fair, right?
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